The W. M. Keck Foundation has awarded $250,000 to the University of Utah to establish a new undergraduate minor in dark sky studies, the first of its kind in the United States. Dark sky studies is an emerging field that explores the impacts of artificial light at night and the loss of our night skies through a broad range of disciplines. Housed in the College of Architecture + Planning, the minor is open to all students across the university who will explore issues through the lens of science, including in public health, urban planning, engineering, and the humanities, from religion to history and philosophy.

In 2017, University of Utah physicist Valy Vardeny called perovskite a “miracle material” for an emerging field of next-generation electronics, called spintronics, and he’s standing by that assertion. In a paper published today in Nature Communications, Vardeny, along with Jingying Wang, Dali Sun (now at North Carolina State University), and colleagues present two devices built using perovskite to demonstrate the material’s potential in spintronic systems. Its properties, Vardeny says, bring the dream of a spintronic transistor one step closer to reality.